Time and Consequence

This time two years ago, I was thinking of applying to work a summer camp in SC. Due to my terrible habit of procrastination, and God's intervention, I didn't get the job. At the time, I raged against the decision. I realized that I am most emotional about the things I fail at. But honestly, for an Avoidant personality type, that's to be expected. Yeah, that's right, I have a personality disorder. At least I think I do. At the very least, I exhibit many tendencies of someone with Avoidant personality disorder, such as avoiding new situations where I might be uncomfortable, and always feeling insecure about my decisions and actions. At least I have a name for it now.

Anyway, that's not what I wanted to talk about. Two years ago I was ridiculously bummed out when I didn't get a job. I wondered if God really did want to use me, and if so, then why wouldn't He let me go to a place where I could do the most for Him? I resigned myself to the water park that summer, and literally hated my job. But I realized something this summer. All that perseverance I learned at the water park helped me out when working camp this past summer. I'm pretty sure that the FUGE staff works harder and longer than any other camp out there. (Though this might be debatable, I know it felt like we worked our tails off.) But I almost never wanted to quit. Why was this? Because I had learned how to suck it up and keep going. In fact, the only time I wanted to just go home was Week 3, when I had a very difficult time keeping my kids in order...just ask some of the other staffers.

Most of the time I can keep my kids focused and on task. Which is miraculous, really, because I couldn't do anything to stop them from misbehaving if they chose to. I never realized how precarious it is for a teacher to keep order. Some just have the natural gift of being intimidating. I don't have that, so for the kids to listen to me at all indicates that I had really good kids most of the time.

Anyway, the point of this scatterbrained rant is that God used what I perceived as a negative experience to prepare me for an awesome one the next summer. God really does know what He's doing, even when to us it looks like our lives are a mess.